I stayed down, crouching next to one of the cars. More cars and trucks drove by along the street, and still nobody noticed anything unusual… or perhaps nobody did anything when they saw armed men approaching a building in the middle of the day in industrial Miami.
Then we heard two explosions from the back of the building. The explosions were not massive nor ground rumbling. They sounded more like two firecrackers going off on the Fourth of July—maybe muted, and quiet enough so as not to trigger a citywide police alert. We were, after all, in the industrial section, where noise was an everyday thing… including muted explosions?
* * *
The shaped charges knocked both large garage doors off of their tracks and back into the warehouse. Smoke and debris churned inside, but very little leaked to the outer side of the doors. Pablo’s men must have been military trained to get that level of effectiveness. Within seconds of the explosions, the two explosives men grabbed flashbang grenades from yet another pocket, pulled the pins, and tossed them into the warehouse. Voices sounded inside, guttural, foreign-language shouts. Five seconds later, the flashbangs went off—loudly, with bright flashes blinding anyone not prepared.
Pablo and his men rushed into the warehouse. Lenny, without a mask, hung back. Five men were standing in different places inside. Two had handguns but were holding their hands to their ears. Three were coughing. There was no resistance inside the warehouse.
Pablo’s men approached each of the five men with their weapons aimed right between the eyes. Lev’s men raised their hands, the two with their guns still attached. Pablo’s men moved again with military precision and flex tied Lev’s men with their arms behind their backs. They searched the men’s pockets, and removed all cell phones and pocket litter. They then pushed them to one side of the large room against the wall, encouraged them down into a sitting position, and flex tied their ankles too. When one of them started to speak, Pablo’s men took cloth strips out of yet another pocket and gagged each of them.
Lenny entered the room and saw the men seated against the wall, being gagged and flex tied. Impressive work, he thought. As he watched the gags being placed on each man, one of Pablo’s men ran out through the blown-out garage door opening to retrieve the man who had been killed. He dragged the dead man into the warehouse and placed him next to the five who were now prisoners. As the smoke cleared, Lenny heard Pablo speaking in rapid Spanish to his drivers in the two cars in front. They dropped the Escalades into Drive, did U-turns, and headed into the building’s parking lot, then around to the back, where they stopped, backed up to the doors, and parked.
* * *
As soon as we heard the explosions, Jaime raced up to the entrance doors and took a position to one side. I waited in between the now-disabled cars, along with Pablo’s other man. Within seconds, a man burst through the entrance doors, waving a handgun. He stopped and scanned the area. Big mistake.
Jaime stepped forward and gave the man a kind of karate chop to the side of his neck, a precision shot that dropped Lev’s man to the ground. Jaime grabbed his gun. Pablo’s man next to me jumped up and sprinted the short distance to the entrance, pulling flex ties out of a pocket on the run. I got up and followed. I was just an observer here; I brought no useful skills to assist Pablo’s men in any meaningful way. I realized it and kept out of their way. Perhaps I was experiencing the business-school principle of delegation—to real professionals with real skills. So far, this was about as professional as it gets.
Pablo’s man grabbed the arms of the man on the ground and flex tied them behind his back. There was talk on the comm unit in rapid Spanish. Jaime said “Si” and opened the door, and the other man pulled Lev’s man into the warehouse feet first; he was unconscious and didn’t seem to mind. Jaime signaled to me to go in too, which I did. The inside of the warehouse was a large, empty space. I saw two large openings on either side of the standing garage door where the two other garage doors had been. Two black Escalades had backed up and were parked in the blown-out spaces. I glanced to the right and saw five men seated against the wall; they were being gagged by two of the men. The situation was totally under control. It reminded me of the Colin Powell doctrine: apply overwhelming force pursuant to a superior strategic plan executed with precision. That was what had happened here.
I studied the interior of the warehouse. There was an office-type structure in one corner, with windows. One wall had floor-to-ceiling shelves with different objects scattered on them in no apparent order. In another corner was a blue tarp covering a pile of something. I could easily guess what was underneath.
I continued surveying the warehouse, sweeping for details and an overview. Pablo walked up to me with a look on his face like he was expecting me to order or request something. I must say I was intimidated by this man and the work he and his team had just done. My normal reaction would be to offer him a bonus and wait for his instructions.
“We’re taking these men,” he said. I saw one of his crew lifting the dead guy into a body bag and zipping it up. At the same time, the back hatch of one of the Escalades clicked open. Another man stepped forward to help lift the body bag into the car. While that was happening, I heard, behind me, Jaime and the other man dragging Lev’s man from the front of the building. They deposited him on his back next to the other five. An even half-dozen prisoners still alive.
I walked over to the six men and studied them. None of these guys was Lev. How was that possible? My mind starting racing. His phone was here, according to James. A bolt of fear cut through my chest. I pushed it away and continued.
“Where’s their stuff?” I managed to ask, regaining some sense that I had hired Pablo and paid him, and that it was me who was ostensibly in charge.
Pablo pointed to one of his men, who picked up one of the kit bags they had brought in and walked it over to me. I looked in and counted six cell phones, several wallets, and some other pocket litter. I took it and handed it to Lenny. “Check the phones with James,” I said to him.
He grabbed the bag and moved to a table on one side, digging into his pocket for his cell phone.
“Let’s see the office,” I said to Pablo. “What’s under that blue cover?”
“I check,” he said. He walked over to the pile and pulled the cover aside. Brown-paper–wrapped blocks were stacked against the wall—at least a hundred of them. Pablo pulled out a knife, punctured one of the blocks, placed a little of the whitish power on the knife, and brought it up to his tongue for a taste. “Cocaine,” he said, blowing the powder off his knife. I was a little surprised he didn’t inhale it.
One of the prisoners started grunting through his gag and trying to stomp his feet; he wanted attention. Pablo walked over to him with his knife dangling ominously in his right hand. With obvious dexterity, he put the knife to the face of the man and used it to lower the gag.
“I have diplomatic immunity!” the prisoner shouted with a heavy accent. “You have to let me go. I am a diplomat.”
“Congratulations, pendejo,” Pablo said dismissively. “Big achievement.”
I rushed over. “What’s your name?” I said.
“Dimitri Porshenko. My credentials are in my wallet. When the police get here, they will release me. We have a treaty with your country.”
“Police,” Pablo said, looking around at his men. They all snickered. The concept was a joke to them. “We be sure to tell police when they get here,” Pablo said, pointing to the prisoners and then gesturing out through the open garage doors. One of the men retied a gag on Porshenko. His eyes were wide with fear.
“Let’s go in the office,” I said, turning and walking in that direction. Pablo followed me, saying something into his comm unit in Spanish. Something came back to him, probably from one of the drivers. “We need to move; somebody complained to police,” he said to me. As we got to the office door, I heard a vehicle drive up and park just outside the garage door. I gl
anced out and saw a dark van backing in between the two Escalades. Pablo’s men started yanking the prisoners up to standing.
I opened the door to the office. There was a desk with a few pieces of paper on it, four chairs total, a landline phone on the desk, a wastepaper basket filled with Chinese takeout boxes… and two suitcases behind the desk. Could it be? They looked exactly the same as the suitcases the Los Bandidos men had brought into Palmetto Plaza. It was just me and Pablo in the office. He spotted them when I did.
“Be careful,” I said, gesturing for him to not approach. “These people are tricky… deadly tricky.” I paused and got closer, examining the two objects without touching them, looking for something like the ricin poison security devices that had been on the boxes at Palmetto Plaza. “This could be a trap,” I said, continuing to look for anything that appeared to be sinister.
Pablo walked past me, reached down, and opened the first suitcase. Cash, full, the customary packets of ten thousand American dollars. He opened the second: same thing, American cash. He closed them and turned the clasps shut.
“Could be a good day, amigo,” he said, getting very close to me.
Was this his intimidation? He certainly had all the odds here in the warehouse in his favor. I needed to show some spine.
“You take one, I take one,” I said, looking directly into his eyes, trying to show some fortitude. He smiled. He had pretty good teeth, only one gold.
“You want split?” he said, continuing to smile, which I took as a good sign.
“I hired you, bro,” I said, trying to stay resolute. He paused for a moment, keeping his eyes on me, probably thinking odds and budgets and whatever else was important to him.
“Okay, amigo, a good day for you… good day for us.” In an act of settlement and brotherhood, he reached for one suitcase, and I reached for the other. Mine was maybe forty pounds. We walked out of the office. The prisoners were not present. I glanced out the garage door and saw the last one being placed in the van.
“You don’t want the cocaine?” I asked.
“We don’t do drugs, amigo… We Americans. We do other business.” Just then, something came over the comm unit, again in Spanish. “Andale, gringos. Police coming. Go,” he said. He gestured to the comm units and the Uzis, which Lenny and I took off and handed to one of his men. Then he pointed to our bulging pockets; we gave him the mags to the Uzis.
“Maybe I just take some for friends,” he said, walking over to the pile of cocaine blocks. He picked three blocks off the top and ran out of the warehouse, cocaine packs in one arm and a large suitcase in the other. He turned to me and said, “Get moving, amigo, you don’t want to be here when the bulls come.”
I was in a kind of stunned inner world. Pablo and his men had handled the whole situation with finesse and military-level competence. And they were leaving us in the warehouse—me and Lenny, alone. I stood and watched as the dark van, then the two Escalades, screeched from the back of the building. I was way up in my head. Fortunately, Lenny was totally in the moment. He grabbed my arm and strongly pulled me toward the departing Escalades.
“C’mon, man, we gotta go,” he said as he yanked me by the free arm. I drew the suitcase closer to my body and started sprinting at full speed.
We cleared the garage doors, turned the corner, and ran, literally for our lives, away from the building. We could hear distant police sirens. We made it out of the lot and ran, along the street, the short block to the BMW. The back hatch was lifting as we got there. I threw the suitcase in, pushed the hatch closed, and jumped into the passenger seat. Lenny started the engine, dropped it into Drive, and looked into the rearview mirror. Police cars, flashing emergency lights, were barreling toward us. I turned and looked behind: three cars moving at speed. The sirens got louder.
“If I pull out now, they’ll see us,” Lenny said.
“Maybe they’ll turn into the lot,” I said, hoping for the best. But as they say in business school, “When hope is a major part of your business plan, make another plan.” The cars were coming fast. One hundred and fifty yards, louder; one hundred yards, louder…
Then an amazing thing happened. I saw it, a black streak of some kind. And it smashed into the windshield of the first police car. It was the drone! It broke the center of the windshield. The driver jammed on his brakes, skidded and rammed into a car parked on the side of the street, and ended up turned sideways. The second and third police cars stopped without hitting the first car, but its position on the road blocked them. Officers exited the three cars, weapons drawn, and crouched behind their car doors, ready for further attack.
Lenny gently pulled away from the curb, and we left the scene with a kind of serenity, our exit greased by Pablo’s ultra-professional handling of the entire operation—using the drone to disable the oncoming police giving us a safe getaway was a genius move.
“Stay cool,” Lenny said to me as we started to breathe normally. “We made it.”
“Man, that Pablo is something,” I said, stating the obvious. “What do you think he’s going to do with Lev’s men?”
“Don’t know. Not our problem.”
He was right. Lev’s men were criminals. They had caused the deaths of several people. Look at what they had done to Lauren. And they had killed Lauren’s friend Cathy. I didn’t really care what Pablo did with those men… but I was curious, because he had referred to them as a “different business.” Did he sell them? I let it go and came immediately back to the present.
“We didn’t get Lev. He’s still a problem,” I said, my mind filling with some negative thoughts. Where was that bastard? James had said he was in the warehouse. Was it just his phone? Had that been a trick of some kind, to get us there? I thought back to the explosion out in the Everglades. Same kind of trick? My mind went dark with the worst sort of thoughts.
We were mostly silent as we drove back to the hotel. Then Lenny said, “One of the phones was Lev’s. James confirmed.”
22
The drive to Lev’s warehouse from the hotel had taken about twenty minutes. But as was happening more frequently, there was congested traffic with its concomitant agonizingly slow movement, so it took thirty minutes to drive back. I used the time as best I could. Lenny and I were both de-stressing, so we didn’t talk much. There’s a kind of shock to the system from military-level activity and physical violence—such as one of Lev’s men being shot dead. I felt that I was experiencing a low level of shock, so I took some deep breaths to overcome it, which seemed to work.
We had witnessed six men taken hostage by Pablo; those men had been taken somewhere for a “different business” of some sort. Pablo and his men had been superb at what they did, how they handled everything, and the result they had achieved. But still, it had been military warfare, domination by force. I really wanted to see Lauren and ask her to hold me. I had a pleasant thought… that Lauren was much more than just another brief yoga relationship, something more lasting and fulfilling in the ways that ultimately matter the most.
I tapped in her phone; it went to voicemail. Maybe she was in deep massage, or in the steam, or swimming, or something else at the spa where she had said she was going. I left a message that we were on our way back, that things had gone well, and that I looked forward to seeing her.
Then I tapped in Agent Ross, who took only four rings to answer. I explained that we would not be at the warehouse this afternoon when his crack SWAT team arrived, and we had learned that Lev Lavorosky would not be there either. He gave the same government crap that he could not countermand the SWAT team’s orders, and that was that. I asked him about the information we had given him concerning the Chinese general heading back to Miami. He replied that it was a classified operation and he could therefore not discuss it with me since I did not have the necessary security clearance. Good thing I’d had sufficient clearance to give him information about the general. Need to know! Finally
, he asked if we had any further information on Daryl Chapman. I had to pause and get a grip on myself. Was that a joke? Oh, right, our government did not joke about such things. I told him we were still investigating that individual and would get back to him when we had new information. Then I thanked him and clicked off. What was I thanking him for?
“Try Lauren again,” Lenny said. His voice showed no emotion, but his asking told me he was concerned. I did and got her voicemail again. I didn’t leave a second message. I was thinking about whether to worry or let it be—she was in the hotel spa enjoying a health day for herself—when my phone chimed. It was Olivia, the intrepid journalist. I accepted.
“Hey, how you doing?” I answered.
“Pretty good. My articles are trending all over the place. I’m going to be on CNN this evening,” she said, energetic as usual. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll have more for you later… if you want.”
“Are you kidding? Of course I want. You’ve been a gold mine,” she said, which touched me in a nice way. “Let’s meet later. Let’s have dinner… I’ll pay,” she offered.
“Let me get back to you. I need to check on a few things. I’ll call you.”
“You better!” she said in a playful way. “Wait! Something else is happening,” she said, changing back into crack-reporter mode. “There was a callout this morning for two Coast Guard cutters out of the Miami station, and specifically for those with long-distance helicopters. The Feds are conducting some kind of operation.”
“Hmmm,” I said. Was this what Ross had referred to?
“You think it has something to do with the Siroco crew?” she asked.
“I have no awareness of this,” I said, sounding more like a politician.
“You sure?”
“Yes. I haven’t lied to you yet, have I?”
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